Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage

by McGoogan, Ken

  Richardson had cut his foot and walked with a limp. The hefty Franklin had been reduced “almost to skin and bones.” And midshipman Robert Hood, the frailest of the navy men, was reduced to crawling through snowdrifts on his hands and knees. Things had been terrible for some time. Now they grew desperate. Hoeootoerock disappeared while hunting, and Tattannoeuck searched but failed to find him. Franklin sent George Back and four voyageurs to dash forward for help. Perhaps at Fort Enterprise they would find food, and someone could return with some of it.

  During the desperate return flight to Fort Enterprise, Hoeootoerock (Junius) went hunting and never came back. Portrait by Robert Hood.

  Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada.

  Robert Hood could go no farther. He pleaded to be left alone. Richardson and Hepburn insisted on staying to care for him. Franklin left the two Scots with Hood and pushed on with nine voyageurs. But the next day, four of these, including a muscular Iroquois named Michel, pleaded that they could not continue. Franklin allowed them to return to the three British sailors. He pushed on with five voyageurs through heavy winds and drifting snow. When at last, having slogged more than sixty kilometres in five days, he and his men stumbled into Fort Enterprise, they found it empty. Where were the promised supplies? “It would be impossible to describe our sensations after entering this miserable abode,” Franklin wrote later, “and discovering how we had been neglected. The whole party shed tears.”

  George Back had left a note. With his four men, he had gone to seek help from Akaitcho, who had said he would winter in one of his camps south of Fort Enterprise. Franklin and his comrades, who soon determined they were too weak to go anywhere, huddled together for warmth as the temperature fell to almost thirty degrees below zero Celsius. They used chairs and floorboards to build a feeble fire. They pulled down deerskin curtains and chewed them for sustenance. They were starving to death and knew it.

  Incredibly, after suffering through eighteen days, they heard footsteps and voices. Akaitcho? Had rescue arrived? No. John Richardson and John Hepburn stumbled into the room. They were the only two survivors from the invalid camp. And they had a terrible story to tell. Michel, the Iroquois voyageur, had reached them alone. He said that his companions had starved to death en route. To Hood, Richardson and Hepburn, he distributed meat, saying he had shot a hare and a partridge. “How I shall love this man,” Hepburn had said, wolfing down the strange-tasting meat, “if I find that he does not tell lies like the others.”

  Michel began behaving strangely. To go hunting, in addition to his usual knife, he carried a hatchet—as if, Richardson thought, he meant to hack away at “something he knew to be frozen.” The hunter produced slices of meat that came, he said, from a wolf he had killed with a caribou horn. Richardson began to suspect that Michel was butchering one or more of his dead companions. Half to himself, Michel muttered about how white men had murdered and eaten three of his relatives. Always one of the strongest voyageurs, he seemed now to grow stronger. When Richardson urged him to hunt, he answered: “It is no use hunting, there are no animals. You had better kill me and eat me.”

  Next morning, Richardson and Hepburn went looking for kindling. From the tent, they heard voices: Michel arguing with Robert Hood. Then came a shot. Rushing back to camp, they found Hood slumped over dead, with a book at his feet: Bickersteth’s Scripture Help. He had accidentally shot himself, Michel said, while cleaning a gun. But when Richardson, a doctor, examined the body, he “discovered that the shot had entered the back part of the head, and passed out at the forehead, and that the muzzle of the gun had been applied so close as to set fire to the night-cap behind.”

  Richardson accused the voyageur of killing Hood. Michel adamantly denied it. But then he stayed close to camp, never allowing the two Scots to be alone for a moment. Richardson conducted a brief funeral service, and on October 23, the party set out for Fort Enterprise. When Michel left a campsite, ostensibly to collect tripe de roche, but probably to prime his rifle, the two Scots conferred. In a direct confrontation, they would be no match for Michel, who carried a rifle, two pistols, a bayonet and a knife. Hepburn volunteered to do the necessary. Richardson said no, he would take responsibility. He ducked down into some bushes. When Michel came back, carrying no tripe de roche but just a loaded gun, Richardson stepped out and shot him through the head.

  The two Scots stumbled on to Fort Enterprise, where on October 29 they joined their fellows in starvation and prayer. Richardson wrote that language could not “convey a just idea of the wretchedness of the abode.” The house had been torn apart for firewood, and the windows stood open to the cold except for a few loose boards. Only one man was still able to fetch firewood. Another lay immobile on the floor. “The hollow and sepulchral sound of their voices,” Richardson wrote, “produced nearly as great horror in us as our emaciated appearance did on them, and I could not help requesting them more than once to assume a more cheerful tone.”

  Soon after he and Hepburn arrived, two voyageurs died of starvation. The survivors had barely enough strength to drag their bodies to the far side of the room. When one man fell to sobbing uncontrollably, Franklin read to him from the Bible. Then he became too weak to hold the Bible upright, and he and Richardson, reciting from memory, repeated verses from Psalm 23: “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .”

  Later, Franklin wrote that he noticed a weakening not just in the men’s bodies but in their mental faculties. “Each of us thought the other weaker in intellect than himself, and more in need of advice and assistance. So trifling a circumstance as a change of place, recommended by one as being warmer and more comfortable, and refused by the other from a dread of motion, frequently called forth fretful expressions . . .”

  Franklin had reached Fort Enterprise on October 11. By November, he and his fellows were surviving on a refuse heap of sleeping robes and bones that had been left behind as garbage. But then, on November 7, three Yellowknife Indians arrived, bringing deer meat and tongues. They had travelled ninety kilometres in two and a half days. George Back, desperately searching here and there, had finally located the winter camp. Akaitcho had sent two of his best hunters with supplies. Now, these two tough Yellowknife men were shocked by what they saw at Fort Enterprise. According to Richardson, they “wept on beholding the deplorable condition to which we had been reduced.”

  The Yellowknife set about nursing Franklin and his fellows back to life. Richardson wrote, “The ease with which these two kind creatures separated the logs of the store-house, carried them in, and made a fire, was a matter of the utmost astonishment to us . . . We could scarcely by any effort of reasoning, efface from our minds the idea that they possessed a supernatural degree of strength.”

  When the survivors were well enough, they set out slowly on snowshoes for Akaitcho’s camp. “Our feelings on quitting the fort,” Franklin wrote, “may be more easily conceived than described.” Of the twenty men who had set out along the coast, nine survived, including Franklin. Now, encountering deep snow, the Yellowknife hunters lent their snowshoes to the invalids. Richardson wrote of being treated with the “utmost tenderness,” and added that the Yellowknife “prepared our encampment, cooked for us and fed us as if we had been children; evincing humanity that would have done honour to the most civilized nation.”

  At the winter campsite of the Yellowknife, the fearsome Akaitcho insisted on preparing a meal for the survivors with his own hands—a remarkable gesture for a warrior leader. He had not been able to cache food at Fort Enterprise because his own people were going hungry. Three of his best hunters, close relatives, had drowned when their canoe capsized in Marten Lake. Their families, grief-stricken, had thrown away their clothes and destroyed their guns. As a result, the remaining men had killed fewer animals than might have been expected. This had worsened the prevailing shortage.

  Even so, when Akaitcho learned that Franklin would be unable to repay him all that had been promised,
he took it with good grace. In an oft-quoted paraphrase, he added: “The world goes badly. All are poor. You are poor. The traders appear to be poor. I and my party are likewise, and since the goods have not come in we cannot have them. I do not regret having supplied you with provisions, for a Yellowknife can never permit white men to suffer from want in his lands without flying to their aid.”

  Akaitcho accompanied the expedition southward, teaching the party, and notably the fair-skinned Franklin, how to treat frostbite by rubbing any telltale white patches that appeared on their faces. At parting from the Yellowknife, Richardson wrote, “We felt a deep sense of humiliation at being compelled to quit men capable of such liberal sentiments and humane feelings in the beggarly manner in which we did.”

  By the time Franklin reached England in October of 1822, the British public had already got wind of his Arctic ordeal. The Admiralty promoted him to post captain. Celebrated as “the man who ate his boots,” he became a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. When he published his Narrative of a Journey to the Polar Sea, drawing heavily on the journals of John Richardson, discerning readers labelled it ponderous—though it became an immediate bestseller.

  Of the eleven men who had died, only one was British. Ten were “mixed-blood” Indians or French-Canadian voyageurs. Franklin’s countrymen viewed this as confirming their own moral and constitutional superiority—their ability to meet and overcome adversity. Franklin himself became a symbol of the cultural supremacy of the British Empire.

  Far from London, experienced observers saw things differently. They began developing a counter-narrative. The voyageurs died in such numbers because they were worn down by the unequal division of labour. They were the ones who hauled and repaired the canoes. They were the ones who did the hunting, the ones who trekked great distances while carrying packs weighing anywhere from 90 to 180 pounds. They did these things without enough food. No surprise, they grew weak. No wonder they died.

  9.

  Tattannoeuck Prevents a Second Debacle

  Having narrowly survived his first overland expedition thanks to Akaitcho, John Franklin returned from his second thanks only to a forgotten Inuk from the northern reaches of Hudson Bay. On that first expedition, as we have seen, Franklin lost more than half his men to exposure or starvation. During the desperate return to Fort Enterprise, Tattannoeuck had pushed on ahead of the struggling party, searching still for his friend Hoeootoerock, but got lost. When finally he stumbled into Fort Enterprise, Franklin was thrilled, and noted that “his having found his way through a . . . country he had never been in before, must be considered a remarkable proof of sagacity.”

  Afterwards, Tattannoeuck returned to Fort Churchill, worked again for the HBC and then for a missionary, John West, who converted him to Christianity. In the Canadian Dictionary of Biography, Susan Rowley neatly summarizes this period. In the spring of 1824, this time with another friend, Ouligbuck, Tattannoeuck agreed to join Franklin on a second expedition.

  Back in England, buoyed by the fact that his countrymen judged his first misadventure a signal success, John Franklin set about preparing a second overland sortie. And here he gave the lie to those who say British naval officers were incapable of learning from experience. Soon after he arrived home, acting with his second, John Richardson, Franklin set to work planning.

  First time in the field, as Canadian scholar Richard Davis has noted, Franklin relied for success on a diversity of peoples: the native peoples of Yellowknife, French-Canadian and Métis voyageurs, Scottish fur traders, Inuit interpreters. None of these were accustomed to naval hierarchy, and to blindly following orders. Second time out, he intended to rely mainly on men who would never question his directives. And he would have these Royal Navy seamen sent out early.

  Franklin proposed to complete the mapping of the North American coastline to the west of the Coppermine River. He and John Richardson would cross the continent and then descend the Mackenzie River to the coast. From there, Richardson would travel east to the Coppermine, while he himself would explore westward to Icy Cape, which Captain James Cook had reached from the Pacific in 1778.

  This expedition would constitute a rebuttal to Russia’s expansionary claims in the Arctic. In his detailed proposal to the Admiralty, Franklin also outlined scientific objectives. Having kept abreast of research by Michael Faraday and others, he proposed to take magnetic observations to locate the north magnetic pole and help determine whether the aurora borealis was an electromagnetic phenomenon.

  The Admiralty approved. On February 16, 1825, accompanied by Richardson, John Franklin sailed out of Liverpool for New York City. From there, the two men travelled north by coach through Albany and Rochester, then crossed the Niagara River to Queenston Heights. Franklin admired the lofty monument to Sir Isaac Brock, who had died there in 1812, and who, like himself, had been present in 1801 at the Battle of Copenhagen.

  Franklin’s overland expeditions are usually dated according to their departures from England in 1819 and 1825.

  Courtesy of Roger McCoy.

  Franklin sailed by schooner to York, which would eventually become the metropolis of Toronto, but was then a town of 1,600 that failed to engage him. The designated voyageurs had yet to arrive from Montreal and, after waiting a few days, Franklin proceeded north 150 kilometres to Penetanguishene on Georgian Bay, a naval base built to protect British interests on the Great Lakes. Here, experts had readied two of the largest canoes used in the fur trade—“Montreal canoes” or canots de maître. These were roughly eleven metres long and almost two metres wide, and could carry three tons of cargo (sixty-five of the usual ninety-pound packs).

  The voyageurs from Montreal caught up with Franklin on April 22, 1825. They gave him a letter that said his talented young wife, born Eleanor Porden, had died of tuberculosis mere days after he sailed out of Liverpool. “Though I was in some measure prepared for this melancholy event,” he wrote later, he had “fondly cherished the hope that her life might have been spared till my return.” Grief “rendered me little fit to proceed” with organizing the next day’s departure. Not wanting to slow the expedition, Franklin left final preparations to Back and Richardson.

  Next day, the expedition set out westward. At this point, it comprised thirty-three men: four British officers, four marines, a naturalist and two dozen voyageurs. The party reached Fort William on May 10, and there traded the two big canoes for four smaller (twenty-five-foot) canots du nord. Leaving George Back to bring forward three heavy-laden craft, Franklin and Richardson went ahead with a light load. They followed the old fur-trade route through Lake Winnipeg, then up the Saskatchewan River to Cumberland House.

  Arriving in mid-June, they learned that an advance party sent out the previous year through Hudson Bay had wintered here and left thirteen days before. It included boatmen and carpenters with three sturdy boats, as well as two Inuit interpreters from Fort Churchill, Tattannoeuck and Ouligbuck. Franklin and Richardson ascended the Churchill or English River and overtook that slow-moving brigade on June 29. After traversing the nineteen-kilometre Methye Portage, the two officers pushed northward to Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca.

  Here, Franklin sent Richardson ahead to Great Slave Lake, in present-day Northwest Territories. On July 23, George Back arrived with the three canoes. With most of the continent crossed, and the heavy lifting done for now, Franklin discharged a number of men. He joined Richardson at Fort Resolution, where he met two guides from his previous expedition, Keskarrah and Humpy, brothers to Akaitcho. They confirmed that many of the Yellowknife hunters who had saved his life during his first expedition had since been killed by a group of Dogrib people.

  The expedition proceeded 550 kilometres farther north down the Mackenzie River to Fort Simpson. Here Franklin met up with two voyageur-guides sent by Peter Warren Dease, a Hudson’s Bay Company officer appointed to assist him. On August 5, the party continued still farther north to Fort Norman, and there split into three groups. George Back went up the Great
Bear River to where Dease was building Fort Franklin. Richardson followed, but travelled beyond that site to scout Great Bear Lake for a route of eventual return from the Coppermine River.

  Franklin continued north down the Mackenzie. He brought Tattannoeuck, whom he called “Augustus,” because he spoke better English than Ouligbuck. During this initial sortie down the Mackenzie, the expedition surprised a group of Dene, who immediately sprang to arms. Tattannoeuck calmed them and, according to Franklin, quickly became “the centre of attraction.” The Dene had recently made peace with local Inuit, and were excited to meet an Inuk from the faraway shores of Hudson Bay. Franklin and junior officer Edward Kendall donned their uniforms and distributed small gifts, but Tattannoeuck remained the star attraction.

  “They all caressed and played around him with the greatest possible delight,” Franklin wrote, “and repeatedly expressed their joy at seeing him. My former high opinion of Augustus was even increased by the great propriety and modesty he evinced under these bursts of applause and favour. He treated them all with kindness and affability at the same time that he continued to perform his office of cooking, which he had undertaken to do for Mr. Kendall and myself on the journey. And when he sat down to breakfast, he gave to each of them a portion of his fare.”

  Franklin reiterated: “We could not help admiring the demeanour of our excellent little companion under such unusual and extravagant marks of attention. He received every burst of applause . . . with modesty and affability, but would not allow them [the Dene] to interrupt him in the preparation of our breakfast, a task he always delighted to perform.”

  Continuing north, the men saw many signs of Inuit habitation, but no people. On August 17, having emerged from the Mackenzie River delta into the salt waters of what is now the Beaufort Sea, Franklin named Garry Island, built a small cairn and left an account of his expedition so far. He also planted a silk Union Jack that had been embroidered by his late wife. Later he wrote, “I will not attempt to describe my emotions as it expanded to the breeze. However natural and, for the moment, irresistible, I felt that it was my duty to suppress them, and that I had no right by an indulgence of my own sorrow to cloud the animated countenances of my companions.”